The Third Man
by K Hanna Korossy
Summary: Jump the Shark tag: How could they not want to know more about the guy who was their brother?


**The Third Man**  
K Hanna Korossy

The rumble of the Impala's engine outside announced Dean's arrival a good thirty seconds before he opened the door. By the time he stepped inside, Sam had tucked his notebook away and changed the browser window to one of the library sites he was supposed to be perusing.

"You find anything?" Dean asked, glancing over Sam's shoulder without making a move to take off his jacket.

"Not yet. Think we should call Bobby, see how he's doing."

"Sounds good." Dean rubbed his hands together to warm them up. "How 'bout…?" He nodded at Sam's heavily bandaged arms. "You still up to hitting the road today?"

"I'm good." The cuts the ghouls had inflicted on him ached, especially in the cold, and Sam couldn't shake the lingering fatigue from all the blood he'd lost. But Dean had bullied him into sleeping most of the last few days and pressed drinks and soup on him whenever he was awake, and Ruby had snuck by one night to top him off when Dean was on a supply run. Sam could stand now without darkness crowding his vision, and in their world, that was considered a full recovery.

"Yeah, you look it," Dean drawled, eyeing him critically. But he didn't push it. He rarely fought Sam on anything those last few months, too much of his energy spent on keeping Hell at bay to argue with his brother, too. Which was just fine by Sam. His brother needed to worry about himself, and Sam and Ruby were fighting the fight just fine on their own.

Well, ghouls and dead half-brothers notwithstanding.

"You wanna take a shower before we go?" Dean offered as he glanced around the room. "I gotta pack up, anyway."

"You'd actually let me?" Sam asked with half-hearted humor as he pushed himself to his feet.

"For the common good, dude. If I'm gonna be in the car with you all day…" He let that hang, implication clear, and began to paw through his shirts. Probably searching for one that didn't look like someone had been buried in it. "Chuck never writes about how you always sweat like a crack whore going cold turkey," he muttered distractedly.

"All right, I get it." Sam laughed for real this time, shaking his head. He hadn't showered since the ghoul attack, but that was totally Dean's fault. Okay, so at first he hadn't been able to stand for long without getting dizzy. But even after he'd started feeling better, Dean had forbidden him to so much as try without his big brother close by in case there was a problem. "You got—?"

Dean was holding out a pair of plastic bags without even glancing up. "You need help getting them on?"

"No, I got it." Sam grabbed the bags and a fresh shirt and trudged into the bathroom.

It wasn't the first time he'd tape up injuries so they wouldn't get wet in the shower, and it probably wouldn't be the last. While he worked on autopilot, his mind wandered back to the research he'd been doing every time Dean left the room.

Adam and Kate Milligan were officially dead now. Although there wasn't much left of Kate and they'd burned Adam's body, Dean had relocated the dead ghouls so they would be quickly found and identified. The town would be burying the wrong bodies, but at least the Milligans would get a marker, and their loved ones, closure.

That hadn't felt like enough for Sam, though. Adam had been their _brother,_a Winchester, someone their dad had loved and tried to look after. Sam wanted to know more about this kid who would've made _him_ a big brother.

So he'd been searching for information, first propped up in bed, then venturing to the table whenever Dean stepped out. School records and college files. Doctor's reports and sports team rolls. Two mentions in the local paper and three in Boy Scout newsletters. Friends interviews, teacher accounts, and one brief conversation with a grieving girlfriend. Just as for any case, Sam had slowly pieced together the person who'd been the brother he would never meet. It was just a lot more personal this time.

The water had warmed to decently hot. The showerhead wasn't set high enough yet again, but Sam was used to that. He stepped inside carefully and twisted himself around to hold his face up to the heated spray.

He'd wanted to share all this with Dean. He knew his brother was curious, too, that he itched to know his lost sibling as much as Sam did if not more. But Dean had closed off the topic just as he had anything else that verged on emotional those days. Guilt at not saving a little brother, Sam guessed, and pain that their father had kept something like this from them. And grief, whether Dean would admit it or not. But he had his hands full just holding himself together lately, and acknowledging the Adam-sized elephant in the room would break him wide open. So Sam kept his findings, and his pain, to himself.

Maybe someday, he thought. He didn't really expect anymore to survive the showdown with Lilith, but all his research was there in his journal. Maybe someday Dean would be ready to read it, and find at least one of the brothers he'd lost.

Sam reached for the soap and started to scrub.

00000

He waited.

He'd dropped the attempt at packing as soon as the bathroom door clicked shut behind Sam, and plopped down in the chair his brother had vacated. Dean listened to the crinkle of plastic as Sam taped his arms up—the same arms that looked like a serious and bloody attempt to end himself—and turned on the water. It was only when he heard the shower curtain _scritch_ behind Sam that Dean's shoulders slumped and he let himself reach for the journal he had tucked inside his jacket.

He'd read the book again from cover to cover while Sam slept, searching between his dad's lines for some sign of Adam's existence. Kate had apparently only told him about Adam in early '03, not six months after Sam left for school; it seemed ghoul-Adam hadn't lied about that. It was about when Dean and John started regularly splitting up to go on separate hunts, so it wouldn't have been hard for his dad to swing by Minnesota sometimes to visit without Dean having known. But besides the obvious missing pages, an increase in midwest and northern hunts in the couple of years after, and a few breaks in dates Dean couldn't account for, there was nothing. No overlooked clues they should have picked up on before, no changes in John's tone or attitude, no mention of the other family he'd left behind. It was like some friggin' Lifetime movie, the guy who has two homes and sets of kids. Except, you know, with flesh-eating ghouls and a high body-count.

Dean poked a foot through his duffel's strap and pulled it closer. Restlessly, he picked through the couple of books he'd stashed inside, select volumes from "Carver Edlund's" masterpieces. There was no reason Adam would appear in their pages, having had no role in Dean's and Sam's lives until the week before, but still Dean had looked. They couldn't seem to stop reading and referencing the books—their frickin' _life_ in print—since they'd discovered Chuck and his works the week before. He'd even considered calling Chuck, asking what the prophet—and wasn't that still a laugh?—knew about the missing Winchester, but eschewed the idea. The knowledge was still too raw to be discussed even with Sam, let alone relative strangers. So Dean had done the little he could and searched the Milligan house, talked to the neighbors, and read through the story of their lives in Dad's and Chuck's books, looking for a glimpse in their pages of a missing major character.

Even _The __Woman __in__ White,_ however, the first book in Chuck's series, had nothing more of their father than that damned voicemail. According to his dad's phone records, John hadn't even called Minnesota to leave a similar warning. Or a goodbye before he'd sacrificed his life a year later.

The sound of the shower cut off. Dean's head popped up. He waited until he heard the shower curtain slide back and Sam slowly step out—and not fall—before he sighed and shut the book, stuffing it back into his duffel. He wouldn't find any answers there no matter how hard he looked.

He grabbed the duffel and plopped it on his bed, then went back to sorting through the clothes he'd left piled on a chair. Between getting the Milligans laid to rest—officially, anyway—and looking after Sam, Dean had had little time for research, let alone laundry. He'd felt guilty stealing an hour with John's journal in the local supermarket parking lot just that morning even with Sam well enough now to be back on the Lilith hunt.

Sam. Dean's hands slowed as they encountered a worn hoodie in the pile of clothes. Sam had taken Adam's death harder in some ways; the kid would have been Sam's only little brother, and he'd grabbed on to the possibility with both hands. Hadn't gone about it the way Dean would have wanted, but then, neither had their dad. Sam's new end-justifies-the-means attitude toward hunting still troubled Dean, something he hadn't let himself examine too closely. But there was no question Sam would have been as kick-ass a big brother as he was a little brother.

Dean swallowed. He longed to talk to Sammy about Adam. He wanted to share what he'd learned about Adam, what he suspected about their dad, what he felt about Kate. Sam was the only one who understood the loss, the opportunities they'd never have and the irrational guilt that ate at Dean. But Sam had only wanted to get back to the hunt, to deny and bury and move on. It figured he'd pick now to adopt the Winchester coping mechanism. Maybe someday, though, after this thing with Lilith was over, they could talk about Adam.

The bathroom door rattled and opened, and Dean blanked his face as he looked up, quickly assessing Sam from bare feet, past jeans and dry bandages and bare chest, to wet head. "Huh. You didn't drown."

"Huh. Hilarious," Sam countered. He pulled a t-shirt on, turning it instantly damp from his dripping hair, then reached for one of the flannels Dean had tossed onto his bed. As he stretched, the bandages drew Dean's eyes again.

Dean nodded at them. "You want me to change those before we go?"

Sam barely glanced at them, arms only a little stiff as he maneuvered into the shirt. "They can wait 'til tonight. Stitches come out tomorrow, right?"

Dean did the quick math in his head. "Day after."

Sam nodded, buttoning up.

Duffel filled and zipped, Dean reached for the notebooks and laptop scattered across the table, only to have Sam quickly step up to pack them himself. Rolling his eyes—Sam and his precious research tools—Dean grabbed John's journal instead, sliding it back into his jacket. Ignoring Sam's questioning look at the silent possessiveness, he quickly asked, "Ready?"

Sam nodded, relinquishing his bags with barely a grimace as Dean snagged them from him. Maybe his arms were healing up nicely, but Sam wouldn't be carrying anything heavier than a change of clothes for a few more days if Dean could help it.

They both took one last glance around the room to make sure they hadn't left anything.

"Let's get out of here," Sam said quietly.

"Amen to that," Dean muttered, and led the way out the door.

00000

They were about two hundred miles outside Windom, over the line into Iowa, at a roadside diner that promised "Like Your Mom's Cooking." That was an invitation Dean never seemed to be able to refuse, even if he had little basis for comparison. Mom hadn't made very good meatloaf or chicken salad, however, if the food here was any sign. Both of them picked at their plates with little appetite.

Sam was aware of Dean eyeing him a long minute before his brother ventured to speak. "You know, if Kate called Dad when Adam was twelve, that means it was after you left for school."

Sam looked up at that, eyes scrunched in puzzlement and lingering pain. Recovering or not, a couple of hours in a car was always going to be hard on stitched skin and fresh scars. "Okay…"

"Just saying." Dean took a bite of the meatloaf, winced, and turned the plate so the mashed potatoes were in front of him. "Dad regretted what he said to you almost as soon as you left. Maybe he saw Adam as kind of a, I don't know, second chance?"

Sam's lips tightened. "To raise a better kid?"

"To not drive his kid away," Dean corrected. "He let Adam have his normal."

"And that got him killed."

Dean gave a weary shrug. "Yeah, maybe. But he was trying."

Sam tugged at the lettuce wilting over the edge of the bun. Dropping it onto the edge of his plate, he next poked at the sad tomatoes. "Maybe," he finally conceded.

It was too little, too late, of course. One son had walked away from his too-tight grip, another had been lost when John had held on too loosely, and Dean… Dean was broken in more ways than Sam could count. But maybe the old man had had his regrets and had missed Sam, trying to do right by proxy with his new youngest son.

Maybe.

He cleared his throat. "We could've saved them if we'd known about them. It's not our fault." _Not_your _fault._

Dean nodded silently as he poked at his plate and took another small bite of mashed potatoes.

Sam reached over and speared a few surprisingly fresh-looking green beans off his brother's plate. He ignored the automatic glare he got in return, knowing Dean had had no intention of eating them. "You still saved your brother," he pointed out.

Dean's glower weakened, pro forma for the emotional breach but grateful, too, for the reminder. "Yeah. The one that's too tall and needs a haircut."

Sam snorted, eating a few more green beans. He didn't even bother reacting when Dean, in turn, stole some of the potato chips from his plate. "You know what Chuck's fans would think if they got wind of Adam, right? Don't even have to deal with the Westermarck Effect."

Dean frowned. "The what now?"

"Westermarck Effect? Reverse sexual imprinting?" Sam shook his head. "It's why incest doesn't happen more often—kids who spend the first couple years of their lives together get desensitized to each other sexually." He finished off the beans and started in on the mashed potatoes.

Dean looked too deep in thought to notice. "So…that's why you're not jonesing for me? Because we grew up together?"

Sam wrinkled his nose. "Yes, Dean," he said dryly, "that's why we're not sleeping together. It has nothing to do with you being a dude or my brother. But yeah, that's why siblings don't usually get hot for each other. But Adam didn't grow up with us. Those 'slash' fans would go nuts with that."

Dean glared at him, shoving his plate at Sam while he snagged Sam's in its place. Defiantly, he bit into the chicken salad sandwich, chewing with his mouth open.

Sam rolled his eyes. "I'm definitely seeing the attraction here." And, huh, if you heaped the mashed potatoes on the meatloaf, it was pretty edible.

"Shut up," Dean grumbled around another bite.

They both did after that, eating in silence, albeit a more comfortable one than before.

And left behind them empty plates, a healthy tip, and the ghost of a lost Winchester when they drove away.

**The End**


End file.
